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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24403198">Beneath the Memory</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/fragile_vampire/pseuds/fragile_vampire'>fragile_vampire</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Castlevania (Cartoon), 悪魔城ドラキュラ | Castlevania Series</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Accidental Confession, Castlevania Season 3 Fix-It, Fix-It, Humor, Insanity, Loneliness, Love Confessions, M/M, Post-Castlevania (Cartoon) Season 2, Swearing, alucard is lonely, post season 2 canon divergence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 04:28:54</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,000</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24403198</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/fragile_vampire/pseuds/fragile_vampire</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>"He was used to sharing some laughter after exchanging contemptuous words with Trevor. Now he couldn't even imagine laughing. It was a voice of his own that he had forgotten, and although he could still remember what Trevor's laugh sounded like, his own muse was forgotten."</p><p>--</p><p>Our lonely sad boy (Alucard) gets the happy ending he deserves :)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Alucard | Adrian Tepes | Arikado Genya/Trevor Belmont</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>134</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Beneath the Memory</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Alucard lay on his table with legs crossed, bathing in the evening sunlight that the room's windows permitted. The only company he had were the two dolls of his own creation that resembled Belmont and Belnades. They were the only voices he heard anymore as he spent his days in the castle which he likened to his own mausoleum - his tomb and also his reminder that he was truly alone - half-vampire, half-human, and totally unloved.</p><p>"Come on Alucard, the dining table is hardly the place to take a nap," came the voice of doll-Trevor.</p><p>"Then where should I sleep, hmm?" Alucard sighed. "Where could I possibly find rest in this cage of shadows designed to torment me?"</p><p>"We should leave him alone, Trevor," said Sypha's doll. "He is like a teenager and this is how teenage boys act: angsty and depressed for no reason other than to create drama for themselves."</p><p>"My being morose has nothing to do with my theatrics," Alucard replied. "I simply do not have the ear for silence all the day, and if I forget the horrible, farcical things you idiots used to say I may in fact unlearn the human vernacular and become the very monster that was my father which you helped me destroy in my childhood bedroom."</p><p>Alucard curled up on his side. Tears had begun to manufacture themselves within him, but he had to prevent them from flowing, lest he forfeit the illusion of interaction he had contrived with the humans he last remembered speaking to. They were all he had left of his remembrance of people. He couldn't reduce them to less than his memory of them, which meant he couldn't show them he had such raw feelings - naturally, he would never admit them to a real person.</p><p>"You're so fucking stupid Alucard," came doll-Trevor's raw voice. "I hate your face. It's stupid, and I get drunk all the time because my brain is so small that I might actually forget how much I hate you if I don't say it every five fucking minutes."</p><p>"You two are so immature. You are both equally stupid and I am the smart one so I am never wrong about anything," railed Sypha's.</p><p>"If I am his equal in stupidity," sighed Alucard, "it's because I have only his stupid insults and his equally stupid face to remember humankind by. I don't even remember you that well anymore, Sypha," he spoke sadly. "I faintly sense you might say something smart and sophisticated but the cadence of your voice is slipping away. Funny, isn't it? You were a Speaker. Your words were meant to be passed down and remembered. They didn't stay with me, though."</p><p>Sypha's doll was mute. Alucard paused to sit up on his knees and look at the other doll with unshowing anguish. "So here I am, stuck with the drunkard of a vampire-whipping Belmont and his mud-stained voice. What devil gave you such a distinguished and indelible voice, Belmont?"</p><p>"Probably the half-dead farm animal my bastard father fucked, or perhaps it was all the beer going to my vocal cords and rusting them over to make them all the more canorous and cruel when I say that Alucard Tepes is as ugly as a pig skin fucked by a horse, and that I hate him a hundred times over. I said a hundred because that's the largest number my tiny skull can accommodate."</p><p>His insults hadn't dulled, and neither had his stupidity.</p><p>"Well, Belmont, you can suck my cock," returned Alucard. "Oh no, wait, you can't, because you're a doll."</p><p>He launched himself off of the table without sound. He was used to releasing some laughter after exchanging contemptuous words with Trevor. Now he couldn't even imagine laughing. It was a voice of his own that he had forgotten, and although he could still remember what Trevor's laugh sounded like, his own muse was forgotten. Trevor's laugh echoed in his brain and it seemed to make his insides sharpen and impale him with wicked pains.</p><p>He had truly lost his mind.</p><p>He suddenly remembered that in the basement of his own home were the remnants of the keep of the Belmonts. Perhaps that is why Trevor's voice stayed with him even now - subliminally, he was forced to think of the Belmonts, because his house was on top of theirs. He had some physical connection to them, and as long as it existed, he couldn't manage to forget the Belmont's voice. Perhaps he would be better off using the library to forget what plagued him.</p><p>"Oh, Sypha, if only you could talk and tell me if there was a memory-suppressing spell in those archives down below. You would know. Well, no matter. I shall go investigate myself. And once I'm right again I shall have no use for you dolls, so consider this a formal good-bye."</p><p>The dolls stared quietly across the table, their daintily-made button-eyes dangling gracefully from their sockets as Alucard's heels tapped away to the entrance of the Belmont's underground keep.</p><p>~~~</p><p>Alucard tossed about books in the great collection below. He couldn't remember how it was organized or exactly what kind of spell would be useful to him, so he was in there for hours.</p><p>When he picked up one of the final books he hoped might have his answer, however, he heard a large thud behind him. And if he didn't imagine it, there was a groan, and a grunt, and soon - yes - the faint smell of sour beer.</p><p>"Hallucinogens," he mused, speculating as to whether it was possible if the book he had touched triggered some sensory disorientation. Out from behind a pile of dusty books between two bookshelves emerged the likeness of a Trevor Belmont. "Amusing," said Alucard, running his fingernails across the book in his hand. "Can you make me see, smell, and imagine things? Do I have control over you, or you over me?" he asked the book. "Or are you merely helping me along towards insanity?"</p><p>"Oh, there's the nasty bastard," called the Belmont apparition, tearing itself up off the floor and slamming its thick shoulder into a bookshelf. Its messy black hair draped onto its forehead without grace. "You look like shit."</p><p>"You would know," answered Alucard. "Shit is your middle name, Trevor Shit Belmont."</p><p>"Oh, I'd forgotten how much of an arsehole you are, you vampire bastard," coughed the ghost.</p><p>"Yes, I hate you too."</p><p>The ghost stumbled around in the pile of books, trying to right itself, before letting out a light-hearted giggle that was so perfectly honest to how Alucard remembered it that it made his heart steel. Why did it prick his amusement so? Why did this disgusting Belmont boy bring him joy?</p><p>"If you truly hated me, Belmont, you wouldn't be some miles away on a road trip," he told it. "You would be here, telling it to my face. If you really hated me you wouldn't've left me alone in this hollow castle where I could do anything and everything to make myself happy and never have to think about your stupid voice again. If you really hated me you wouldn't rely on echoes or apparitions to tell me. You'd make sure I didn't go a day without hearing about it. For all you know, I could be having the time of my life, not thinking of any Belmont ever again."</p><p>Alucard paced towards the ghost with silent, seething despair. Why did he hate so much this man, yet also so desperately want to see him again? The castle of Dracula haunted him with shadows, and now, it seemed, the library of Belmont haunted him with ghosts.</p><p>"I don't know," said the ghost Belmont. "I'm sure I could tell you I hate you every day if you wanted me to. I haven't got anywhere else to be right now."</p><p>"Why's that?" asked Alucard. "Because you are a play-thing? You are a whim of my own memory. You can't be anywhere or anything except what I want."</p><p>This echo of Trevor was very deceptively accurate - Alucard looked upon the way its chest pronounced itself through folds in its rags, and it seemed unnaturally familiar. He tiptoed through the stacks tenderly. The jelly-legged apparition in all its apparent realness was now only a few feet away and Alucard could now appreciate the rawness of his smell, his skin, and his voice all at once, just as he always remembered. He wondered if it would also taste like a Trevor Belmont - lacking any precedent in his own memory, what taste would such an apparition provide him?</p><p>"I thought you might be lonely," said the ghost of a man, "but it looks like the month and a half alone has really taken a toll on you."</p><p>"I'm not lonely," spoke the half-vampire with drool in his mouth. "Not anymore. Stupid Belmonts and their disgusting books may have delivered me my salvation." He lurched forward and swallowed the ghost's lips in his own, drinking beer-stained spit from the mouth of the mess of a human apparition below him with his hand around his neck. He took several sips into his fanged mouth before letting him go, dropping the imaginary Belmont to the pile of books.</p><p>"I'm pleasantly surprised," remarked Alucard. The taste was foreign - not conjured by his own memory, yet very cogent and real. "Somehow my faculties are fully convinced that you are in fact here."</p><p>"That's because I am here, you dim-witted dog," responded the man in the pile of books, trying in vain to lift himself out of the collapsing stack.</p><p>"Impossible," said Alucard. "If you were really here, I would have to reconcile how many movements my heart makes when I look upon a fantasy version of a man that I do, in fact, very much hate. I would never speak so honestly to someone so idiotic and uncultured, lest I make a fool of my name. Whatever spell I am under is quite potent, and I fully intend to use it until I am better in the head, so the next time I see you I can have forgotten you completely and not show any signs of suffering from your absence."</p><p>"Alucard," interrupted Trevor, "there's no spell. I'm here. Sypha kicked me out until I could stop holding her back. Something about me being obsessed with another man's penis."</p><p>"Yes, that does sound like something Sypha would do," spoke Alucard.</p><p>"And well, I didn't know where else to go, so I took as much beer as I could afford and crashed down here for a while," continued Trevor.</p><p>"That, too, is in character. Tell me, apparition, how does this all work? Is this fantasy based on my own memory? Or is it based on the memory of others who were here?"</p><p>"I have no idea what you're talking about, honest to God."</p><p>"Well then, maybe you should try being less honest to God, and instead be honest to me," he spoke, kneeling over Trevor's tumbled, ragged body. "What does Trevor Belmont think of Alucard Tepes?"</p><p>Trevor trembled beneath the terrifying man interrogating him. He couldn't help but shiver as Alucard's hair of silk brushed across his forearm softly, and when he looked upon his pectorals he was troubled to imagine anything besides squishing them. "I hate you," he replied finally, with a stupid, toothy grin betraying his fondness.</p><p>Alucard smiled. "I hate you, more," he whispered even more affectionately.</p><p>Trevor laughed, and then Alucard laughed, and then they were both laughing in a pile of books for several minutes before they decided to kiss again, and again, and yet a fourth time, until Alucard decided that it didn't matter whether the man was apparition or real, and that he wanted to spend the rest of his time in exile in the library of Belmont, making a disgustingly cute and acutely disgusting man amuse him and abuse him to the extent of his own fantasy beneath the mausoleum.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This is my very first fic that I'm publishing on this website! I haven't even finished the latest season of Castlevania, and I still have far too many Feelings caused by Attachment. Writing this was a coping mechanism for me, and I hope it helped you cope as well</p></blockquote></div></div>
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